Check out my revamped web site. Plus reviews and interviews and scribblings.My website has undergone a major overhaul. I’m still adding content, but have a look. www.jamesthompsonauthor.com. I’ve added a lot more AV material, expanded the international books sections, am adding a lot of new images, review, interviews, all that good stuff. If you have the inclination, sign up for the mailing list while you’re there.

I had written a big chunk of a new book and decided it was trash. I deleted and emptied the recycle bin. I’m running away. Within 24 hours I understood why it was garbage and what it took to make a real book out of it.

I need a change of scenery, a change in routine, to write this new book. And when I’m done, I’m going somewhere to decompress, I don’t know where yet.  Here are recent scribblings, either by me or about me, and some various and sundry.

Of the seven books I’ve published, (4 in English), critics (overall, a couple were less than enamoured) have never been so generous in their praise of a novel I’ve written. My thanks to you all. Some new reviews, interviews with me, and various and sundry are below. I doubt that I’ll write another blog until the book is done.

Thank You, Finland! http://jamesthompsonauthor.com/2013/04/thank-you-finland/

Scandinavian and Nordic Crime Fiction started Helsinki Blood as a group read two days ago. Don’t have it? Compare for the lowest prices on my website. www.jamesthompsonauthor.com http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/3953983-scandinavian-and-nordic-crime-fiction-will-start-reading-helsinki-blood

Bookreporter Helsinki Blood: An Inspector Vaara Novel, by James Thompson.
You want dark with your literature? I have some dark for you. The book is HELSINKI BLOOD, and the author is James Thompson. It should come wrapped in a shroud instead of a cover. Thompson, a native Kentuckian who now resides in Finland, covers the waterfront of noir crime fiction to a degree and manner that few can match. Thompson puts one in the mind of Ken Bruen, and while the literary styles of the two men are very different, they are truly sons of different mothers, with Bruen’s Jack Taylor and Thompson’s Vaara blood cousins.

At one point I literally stood up and screamed, “NO! NO! You can’t DO that!” Thompson could do it, of course, and he did. As Bruen often does, Thompson goes head first and full in where both angels and demons fear to tread. For those who picture Finland as a dull sort of place where little but fishing occurs, an afternoon with Thompson and HELSINKI BLOOD will change your waking and sleeping impressions of that country forever.

: 7 Questions with James Thompson http://www.bookpage.com/the-book-case/2013/04/26/7-questions-with-james-thompson/  A recent one, but on the all-time favorite list. Noir Nation THE ADVANTAGE OF NOT BEING A NATIVE: RICHARD GODWIN REVIEWS JAMES THOMPSON’S HELSINKI BLOOD http://noirnation.com/2013/04/14/advantage-native-richard-godwin-reviews-james-thompsons-helsinki-blood/

This reviewer hasn’t read Helsinki Blood yet, but I like these overviews of my work.   Now is Gone: Helsinki White http://katysozaeva.blogspot.fi/2013/05/review-helsinki-white.html I’m even more desperate to continue this series now. I want to know what happens next. I’m hoping for the best but expecting the worst, as that seems to be the way this series is going. However, speaking for the series as a whole now, I can highly recommend it to those who enjoy their murder mysteries dark, their characters interesting (if not necessarily nice), and their stories well-told. Be sure to check them out if you haven’t already. Now is Gone: Lucifer’s Tears http://katysozaeva.blogspot.fi/2013/05/review-lucifer-tears.html Like Snow Angels, the denouement completely blew me away….The ending of this book is sort of bittersweet, but I’ll leave the discovery as to why up to you.  I will say that if you enjoy a really well-done mystery, you won’t want to miss this terrific series by James Thompson. Highly recommended. Now is Gone: Snow Angels http://katysozaeva.blogspot.fi/2013/05/review-snow-angels.html It is called kaamos—two weeks of unrelenting darkness and soul-numbing cold that falls upon Finnish Lapland, a hundred miles into the Arctic Circle, just before Christmas. Some get through it with the help of cheap Russian alcohol; some sink into depression…This year, it may have driven someone mad enough to commit murder. The brutalized body of a beautiful Somali woman has been found in the snow, and Inspector Kari Vaara must find her killer. It will be a challenge in a place where ugly things lurk under frozen surfaces, and silence is a way of life.

The Big Thrill Helsinki Blood by James Thompson. Interview by George Ebey
http://www.thebigthrill.org/2013/04/helsinki-blood-by-james-thompson/   The Reading Room http://www.thebigthrill.org/2013/04/helsinki-blood-by-james-thompson/

Helsinki Blood solidifies Thomson’s status of a great storyteller who goes well beyond creating just crime fiction. It is hard not to draw some parallels here with The Girl with Dragon Tattoo since Thomson has now shown us a few times that similarly to Stieg Larsson he is also prepared to tackle some serious social issues that plague Scandinavian countries: substance abuse, nationalism, anti-immigrant attitudes and deeply ingrained criminal activities. Be forewarned that the whole series is not for faint hearted but if you are looking for intelligent crime fiction that will keep you reading till the middle of the night and will keep you thinking about it for a lot longer this is definitely a book to try.

The Reading Room
http://www.thebigthrill.org/2013/04/helsinki-blood-by-james-thompson/
Helsinki Blood solidifies Thomson’s status of a great storyteller who goes well beyond creating just crime fiction. It is hard not to draw some parallels here with The Girl with Dragon Tattoo since Thomson has now shown us a few times that similarly to Stieg Larsson he is also prepared to tackle some serious social issues that plague Scandinavian countries: substance abuse, nationalism, anti-immigrant attitudes and deeply ingrained criminal activities. Be forewarned that the whole series is not for faint hearted but if you are looking for intelligent crime fiction that will keep you reading till the middle of the night and will keep you thinking about it for a lot longer this is definitely a book to try.

Bye. Se ya when I see ya. When I have a new book in hand.

James Thompson
Helsinki, Finland
05.05.2013

Today, I’ve received generous grants from two prestigious Finnish cultural foundations: WSOY:n kirjallisuussäätiö, and Kirjailijoiden ja kääntäjien kirjastoapurahalautakunta. I’m more than honored. When I began my career as a novelist here in Finland, I never dreamed that those who decide what is of cultural value to this nation would deem my work of sufficient merit to reward me for it. I’m humbled and you have my gratitude.

Others who decide what is of literary merit have also been kind to me over the past couple days. Helsinki Blood has been out in the States For about five weeks now. The recent reviews below are characteristic of the perhaps fifty reviews the book has received from major reviewers. I’m pleased and grateful that they’ve found the book praiseworthy. Thanks to all.                   

Mystery People
http://mysterypeople.wordpress.com/2013/04/18/mp-review-helsinki-blood-by-james-thompson/

Nordic Bookblog
http://bookblog.scandinavianbooks.com/helsinki-blood-by-james-thompson/

London Free Press
http://www.lfpress.com/2013/04/18/book-review-finnish-detective-haunted-by-past

Writerspace: Review of James Thompson’s Helsinki Blood
http://writerspace.com/blog/content/advantage-not-being-native
https://www.facebook.com/Writerspace
https://twitter.com/Writerspace

Best Regards,
James Thompson
Helsinki, Finland
April 26, 2013

 Living on Top of History

It’s the kind of place where history oozes from around the stones at your feet. Iceland is a a newish sort of country, both historically and geologically. It appeared as the undersea faultlines of the North Atlantic ridge spewed out enough molten rock for it to finally break the surface and grow, long after the formation of Europe or the Americas.

Then place was populated late as well. The official story is that Iceland was settled in the ninth century, five hundred years after the Romans had left Britain and with the Dark Ages well under way. History has a habit of being written by the winners, and the descendants of those disenchanted Norwegian chieftains who weren’t prepared to accept the new king’s rules and who left while the going was good were the ones who wrote the history.

Those Icelandic sagas make fascinating reading, not just for what they say, but for what’s left out. The authors’ names, for instance. We don’t know who wrote down the stories that had already been passed by word mouth for generations, although it’s accepted that Snorri Sturluson wrote the Prose Edda and Heimskringla, the history of the Norse Kings, as well as (probably) Egil’s Saga. Snorri himself was at the centre of political intrigue in his own Sturlunga era, murdered in 1241 at his home at Reykholt, probably on the orders of the Norwegian king.

Snorralaugur, Snorri’s hot-spring bath is still there. You can walk around the stones at the edge of it and dip your fingers into the water. It’s history in front of you; violent history. The settlers weren’t the most peaceful of people and in spite of having set up a society in which the rule of law supposedly took the place of a king, in reality influence, patronage, intrigue, money and feuding were the way things were done. Does that sound familiar? It should. The real difference between then and now is that the tradition of seeking blood vengeance has thankfully died out.

Disputes as often as not were settled by violence. Gunnar of Hlíðarend, one of the heroes of the saga age, was burned in his house. Apparently it was a pretty effective method. A homestead would be surrounded so the victims couldn’t escape and the place was set alight. Gunnar died in the flames of his house at Hlíðarend after his wife, Hallgerður, refused him a lock of her hair to re-string his bow, something that could have allowed him to keep his enemies at bay and could maybe have saved him to fight another day. The site of Gunnar’s homestead is still a working farm, as is Bergthórshvöllur a few miles away over the plain where Njáll and his family were also murdered by the same burners.

Gísli Súrsson, hero of Gísli’s Saga, was relentlessly hunted down and the site of his last stand with his back to the rocks is plainly visible in remote Geirthjófsfjörður. Gréttir the Strong was pursued and came to a grisly end on the island of Drangey, an end brought about by sorcery and betrayal.

There has been a working farm at Melar in Hrútafjörður for more than a thousand years and here Gréttir the Strong grew up and would have taken part, unwillingly, with the harvest and the lambing on these same pastures
©TonyPrower.com

It’s all about intrigue, kinship, revenge, inevitable retribution and sharp, vicious killing. All the ingredients of the hardest-boiled mediaeval noir are there. These were violent times, but there was rarely any great mystery over who had killed whom. It’s more about why than who.

Also left out of the sagas are the tantalising glimpses of the Norsemen’s predecessors. The disgruntled Norse noblemen weren’t the first to arrive. Explorers in the Roman era had found ‘Thule’, a land where the sun never set. They must have been, sensibly, travelling in their fragile ships at the height of summer. It’s not known if the Thule they found and didn’t return to was Shetland, the Faroe Islands, Iceland or even Greenland, but there was trade of some kind with Thule as the narwhal tusks that found their way southwards from the Arctic are the roots of the unicorn legends.

After them came settlers from… who knows? Shetland or Ireland, maybe? A settlement of christian monks in eastern Iceland didn’t last long after the arrival of the new settlers from Norway in search of the dark ages equivalent of lebensraum. All that remains of the monks is the name of the island where they supposedly lived; Papey, Pope’s Island. The same goes for other settlers who had made Iceland their home before 874, not to mention the slaves and concubines the Norsemen brought with them. The mentions they get are of when they go feral and are tracked down, caught and killed. The exception is Melkorka, who appears in Laxdæla Saga, supposedly the daughter of an Irish king who found herself enslaved and bought by a roving Icelander.

The pre-settlement settlers must have seen the arrival of the warlike new overlords with dread, and they can hardly have had a happy time of it. Virtually all traces of them have vanished and they undoubtedly became the underclass who did much of the hard work. All that’s left is some only relatively recently researched remains, some fleeting references in the tales that the Norsemen passed down until they were finally written on paper, and the genes of those downtrodden settlers subtly mingled into those of present-day Icelanders.

History jumps up out of the rocks and as I drive north through the lava fields and over the heath to the coastal village where I spend much of my time in Iceland, I pass the farm at Melar in Hrútafjörður. It’s a working farm and has been for more than a thousand years. This is where Gréttir the Strong was born and must have helped with the lambing and haymaking in those very same pastures. A little further along is the long spit of land at Borðeyri. The place is a shadow of what it once was, but this is where the traders and raiders hauled ashore their ships for the winter in the lee of the shingle bar. Another few miles and there are the lands where much of the saga events took place, including the lost homesteads such as Svölustaðir in Viðidalur mentioned in Bandamanna Saga, presumably abandoned in hard times, and Iceland’s hardest times were in the wake of the most cataclysmic volcanic eruption of the age at Lákagil in 1783. This killed a third of the population and half the livestock. The ash cloud circled the world and may have killed six million people as crops failed and a new age of revolution was ushered in.

Borðeyri is now a village of a few dozen people. A thousand years ago Iceland’s traders and raiders overwintered their ships on the beach here as the place was an important trading point. A century ago hundreds of emigrating Icelanders sailed from Borðeyri for Canada
Photo by my old friend and photographic tour guide Tony Prower
©TonyPrower.com

Alongside the same road is Borgarvirki, a makeshift fortress dating back to Jörundur the Dog-Day King, a Danish adventurer who in 1810 tried unsuccessfully to free Iceland from the royal yoke and set up a liberal society in its place. A little further along are the mounds where the last execution in Iceland took place when Friðrik Sigurðsson and Agnes Magnúsdóttir were beheaded after the clumsy murder of a local farmer, their victim’s brother wielding the executioner’s axe.

This modest stone marks the spot where Iceland’s last execution took place when Agnes and Friðrik were beheaded by Guðmundur Ketilsson, their victim’s brother.

Not far from Blönduós, and the end of my drive in the country, there’s the memorial to Thorvaldur Víðförli the Far-Travelled, a missionary who lived at Stóra-Giljá (another of those farms that go back a millennium) and went around the country preaching the new faith with a German bishop for whom he interpreted. The two of them and their activities weren’t popular back in 981AD and some people in the region made up scurrilous verses that spread through the countryside, the dark ages equivalent of Twitter, lampooning the bishop and his interpreter as a homosexual couple.

Thorvaldur took offence, so he found who was behind the verses and killed them. So much for Christian tolerance and turning the other cheek. But violence has never been that far away in this place where history snaps at your ankles.

The Umpa Lumpa Song

Umpa lumpa ompady doo
I’ve got another question for you

What would you do if I done a big poo
What would you do if I didn’t flush the loo
What would you do if I left the lid up
What would you do if I pissed in a cup
What would you think off that

Umpa lumpa ompady doo
I’ve got another query for you

What do you get if you guzzle down sweets
If you see a girl then you’re in for a treat
Prostitution is the way to go
So stand on the corner and wait for a ho
What do you say to that

Umpa lumpa ompady doo
I’ve got another tale for you

How do you fell after a night rocking
How do you fell after a night fucking
Knackered and tired with a bagging head
You just want to drop down dead
How do you fell about that

Umpa lumpa ompady doo
One more little riddle for you

Why do you run around all day
Doing what someone else says
If you rebel you will win
So don’t give a shit and start to sin
So why don’t you do that

Umpa lumpa ompady doo
That’s the end of the umpas for you

Best, Jim

Photo courtesy of Markus Schulte

Hello!

Not just viral, but viralest of the viralest viral. An interview delivered to tens of millions of readers. For a few days, I was the most widely read about writer on the planet. What a thing to be able to say! Not so long ago, if you were viral, it could be a scary thing. Aids! Anthrax! Ebola! In our time, a lot of people would give their right arms to go viral. I went viral, and guess what? It didn’t hurt a bit. And I will tell you the story after a smidgeon of self-promotion.

 Many writers—it’s become a trend that drives me crazy—spam the social networks, pleading with people to buy their masterpieces of literature. I delete about a hundred a day. No joke, sometimes more. I have a new book coming out, Helsinki Blood, on March 21^st, the fourth in the Inspector Vaara series. I WILL NOT ASK YOU TO BUY THIS BOOK. But I have a goal. I’ve never made the New York Times Bestseller List. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not that hard to do. It usually takes about 2000 copies, sold within one week, to make the list. Pre-orders count toward the sales of the week the book is released. I will ask this of you. If you INTEND to buy the book anyway, please pre-order it now and help me reach my goal. It’s been a small dream of mine for a while. I’ll share a few blurbs, to give you a clue of what the book is about. Then I’ll post the links to the book from your favorite online booksellers, so that you’re just a click away if you’d like to buy it. If you bear with me that far, I’ll tell you my story of criminality and its road to virality. 

Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Books-A-Million
IndieBound
iBookstore
Sony  (all my books are at this link)
Kobo  (same here)
Sony and Kobo don’t accept pre-orders, but will have Helsinki Blood for sale on its release date. The Helsinki White paperback will be released on February 5th. You can also pre-order it from the bookstores above (just click James Thompson on the pages I’ve linked, and you’ll land on a page where all my books are available in all formats, and of course, you can get the Helsinki White paperback from Sony and Kobo on the release date.

About Helsinki Blood. The catalog copy:

A missing woman too unimportant to raise alarms . . . criminal masterminds too powerful to pursue. And when the system fails, Inspector Kari Vaara must dispense his own brand of justice.

Kari Vaara is recovering from the physical and emotional toll of solving the Lisbet Söderlund case when he’s approached with a plea: an Estonian woman begs him to find her daughter, Loviise, a young woman with Down syndrome who was promised work and a better life in Finland . . . and has since disappeared.

One more missing girl is a drop in the barrel for a police department that is understaffed and overburdened, but for Kari, the case is personal: it’s a chance for redemption, to help the victims his failed black-ops unit was intended to save, and to prove to his estranged wife, Kate, that he’s still the man he once was. His search will lead him from the glittering world of Helsinki’s high-class clubs to the darkest circles of Finland’s underground trade in trafficked women . . . and straight into the path of Loviise’s captors, who may be some of the most untouchable people in the country.

As Kari works his new case, a past one comes back to haunt him when powerful enemies return to settle unfinished business. In a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse, he is propelled toward a reckoning in which the stakes are life or death . . . and only the victors will be left standing.

Review Comments
“Compelling…Thompson draws on his long residence in Finland to convincingly portray a grungy northern underworld.”—Publishers Weekly

“Kentucky native Thompson has created in Kari a hero as dyspeptic as Kurt Wallender and as prone to vigilante justice as Harry Hole”—Kirkus

“James Thompson’s prose blend of chilly Scandinavian atmosphere and dark Southern Gothic is unique and jolting, like an ice-cold straight razor slashed across sweaty flesh.  In Helsinki Blood there are equal measures of violence, detection, pathos, blood . . . and finally, sweet redemption.”—C.J. Box, New York Times Bestselling Author of Force of Nature and Breaking Point

“Helsinki Blood is as dark and bracing as a Nordic winter . . . Kari Vaara blasts other maverick cops out of the (icy) water.”—M. J. McGrath, author of White Heat and The Boy in the Snow

“I can’t get enough of this author. No one writes noir better, Nordic or otherwise.”—Leighton Gage, author of Blood of the Wicked

“Inspector Kari Vaara’s latest nightmare barrels along at a breakneck pace as he faces enemies on his doorstep as well as his own demons within. James Thompson’s spare, no-frills action is straight to the point. Helsinki Blood as raw as it gets, it doesn’t pause for breath and it and takes no prisoners.”—Quentin Bates, author of Frozen Assets and Cold Comfort

“In his fifteen years of living in Finland, Kentucky born and-bred Thompson has absorbed enough cold, dark atmosphere for a spot on the roster of top Nordic crime writers—Mankell, Nesbø, Indriðason and the like.”—New York Post

“A must-read for fans of Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell.” —Booklist

And now I will tell you a story.

I had an interview scheduled with ace Associated Press journalist, David Mac Dougall, in a bar I refer to as my office. I was making a small black market deal outside the bar—buying a piece of Russian military hardware as a Christmas present for my godson—wanted to make a good impression and was hurrying to seal the deal before David arrived. He arrived just as money and merchandize were about to change hands. Busted. I thought the interview would go wrong as a result.

Quite the opposite. David had read the first three books of the Inspector Vaara and his questions were though-provoking and insightful. I normally don’t like interviews (they make me nervous and I don’t like attention paid to me), but I genuinely enjoyed our talk, and I think David did too. A few days later, AP ran the story and it was like a bomb hit. Virtually every AP subscriber ran it, and there are thousands. Here are some examples:

An interview with me went viral in Europe last summer. Me and Santiago Gamboa, at Semana Negra, in Spain

The New York Times, .msnbc.msn.com, Business Week, USA Today, The Huffington Post, NPR, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, US News, NBC, ABC and FOX network affiliate websites, Salon The St Louis Tribune, Newsvine, The Republic, The Houston Chronicle, USnews.com, onepagenews.com, USA Today, Topix, Boston.com, Verizon.com, Yahoo news, basically every news outlet in the U.S. and Canada, even in odd places like The Kentucky Sheriff’s Association’s Latest News. Here’s the article: US Crime Author has Dark Take on Finnish Society.

Then it crossed the big water and I saw it on EIN NEWS, a major European newswire, much like Associated Press, focused on business and politics, especially EU politics, and the writing was on the wall. The piece was repositioned from a human interest feature to a political commentary. It spread across Europe, much as it had in the U.S., and even made its way into Russia and Japan.

And then the damnest thing happened. It came back across the Atlantic with its new positioning, and the story was run AGAIN, a second time, by many of the same news points that had already carried it. For instance, the Sunday addition of the Washington Post. Here in Finland, Suomen Kuvalehti, our version of Newsweek, printed it.

I’ve often been teased about my novels guaranteeing that I’ll never have a job with the Finnish National Board of Tourism, but it appeared in Discovering Finland,  a publication of The National Tourist Board, and I’m slated for an interview with the Foreign Ministry’s website, thisisFINLAND.fi. So, I emerge as a representative of Finland, at the request of the government, for their publications designed to attract business and tourism. Who the hell would ever have thunk that? I’m taking a kind of perverse pleasure in the irony, after reading garbage from right-wing idiots spouting things like I should be deported for besmirching the good name of Finland. And the viral blast drove my sales out the roof, but who’s counting

The past year has been a wild ride. I had no idea how much I had written until checking to write this. Far too much to list here. However, besides my own blogs and posts, you can find twenty-five essays I’ve written on International Crime Writers Reality Check, including such gems as MY CAT, SULO, MAY BE THE NEXT STIEG LARSSON and about a dozen book reviews I’ve penned for the The New York Journal of Books, In my humble opinion the best review publication extant in the English-speaking world.

It’s been a good year. I even got a bright shiny new contract with my publisher, Putnam, bigger and better than any previous deals, ensuring that in the future I’ll bring you new Inspector Vaara series books for some time to come.

Is this the next Stieg Larsson?

Thanks for putting up with me and reading this ridiculously long blog.

Best to All,

James Thompson

Sulo wishes you Merry Christmas

n

Looks like Christmas came early! I couldn’t ask for a better present. This feature went yesterday, and has appeared in hundreds or thousands of publications. The AP delivers to thousands of media outlets, and reaches over a billion people a day; a million or so will likely read this article. The idea staggers me. A huge thank you to journalist David Mac Dougall. I’ve only provided to a link Salon, under the assumption that you don’t want to read it in a thousand places, but I’ll include some other notable publications you can read it in if you wish. I confess, listing them is an act of vanity. But this is one of those once in a lifetime events, so please forgive me.

Huffington Post

NPR (I think all 900 in the network), The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, US News, NBC, ABC and FOX network websites, The St Louis Tribune, Newsvine, The Republic, The Houston Chronicle, usnews.com, onepagenews.com, USA Today, Topix, Boston.com, Verizon.com, Yahoo news, Business Week, Salon…ok, I’ll stop now. Thanks for indulging me, my head is still spinning.

Good wishes to all, and to all a good night.

Jim

He knows when you’re sleeping

He knows when you’re awake.

He knows if you’ve been bad or good

So be good for goodness sake

Santa Claus. Portrayed as, and instilled in us in childhood, as a benign figure. The above though, speaks volumes. It reads more as a statement that would describe a CIA or KGB director than a man who has dedicated his life to pleasing children. What sort of creature resides behind that cottony white beard?

Joulupukki, AKA Santa Claus, AKA St. Nick, is Finnish, and is known all too well here, although parents have begun masking the truth in this generation, to avoid traumatizing children, praying he won’t show up at their doors on Christmas Eve and destroy the façade created in an attempt to protect them.

Santa is as much beast as man, and appears half human, half goat. For centuries, Santa showed up on Christmas Eve, drunk and demanding more booze. He didn’t come to give gifts to children, but to collect them. An appeasement in return for safety. His transformation through misinformation emanating from the highest powers is one of the best kept secrets of the modern world. The below is a rather forgiving portrait of the monster. But the Finns haven’t forgotten. They know. They recall the horror only too well.

Let the truth ring out, and Devil take the hindmost.

I wish you joyous holidays – Jim

Coming soon!

This game of author tag works like this. Each author answers a series of questions. First was Quentin Bates, now me and I may bring in some others; then Icelandic crime writer Ragnar Jónasson, who will also hopefully bring few of his compatriots into this to; art historian, writer and voracious reader Christine Poulson; and finally but by no means least, Damien Seaman whose The Killing of Emma Gross was one of the finest of the 2012 crop of new books.

1)      What is the working title of your next book?

Book 5

2)      Where did the idea come from for the book?

It’s the 5^th book in the Inspector Vaara series. I name them after I finish them.

3)      What genre does your book fall under?

Pitch black noir

4)      What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Matt Damon and Audrey Hepburn at age 25

5)      What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

Cold kills.

6)      Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Represented

7)      How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

Since it’s my next book, as stated above, I’m now writing it. But a first draft takes about three months.

8)      What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I don’t know of any other writer whose work is stylistically like mine. But then, maybe I’m just too close to it to see it. I get compared to Stieg Larsson a lot, but I think it’s because we tackle similar things, not because our writing is similar.

9)      Who or what inspired you to write this book?

An image of a naked newborn girl, maybe two days old, gone missing and found frozen stiff as a board in the snow on the hospital grounds.

10)   What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Isn’t that enough?

Happy holidays! – Jim 

Walmart rocks!

Kirjavinkit: Jim Thompson: Valkoinen viha http://www.kirjavinkit.fi/arvostelut/valkoinen-viha/

Jim Thompson; Valkoinen viha  http://rakkaudestakirjoihin.blogspot.fi/2012/08/jim-thompson-valkoinen-viha.html

Kainuun Sanomathttp://www.kainuunsanomat.fi/Arvostelut/1194760092031/artikkeli/Satellite?c=Page&childpagename=KSA_newssite%2FAMLayout&cid=1194597226554&pagename=KSAWrapper

Helsingin Sanomat  http://www.hs.fi/kirjat/artikkeli/Likainen+Kari++rotuvihan+py%C3%B6rteiss%C3%A4/HS20120816SI1KU02otl

Aamulehti  Arvostelija ei tiedä edes kirjan nimeä. Onkohan hän lukenutkaan sitä?http://www.aamulehti.fi/Kirjat/1194759856484/artikkeli/jim+thompson+valkoinen+vaara.html

Savon Sanomat  http://www.savonsanomat.fi/viihde/kirjat/jim-thompson-valkoinen-viha/1229860

Jos haluat hyvät naurut, lue tämä. http://hommaforum.org/index.php/topic,74123.0.html

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